Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

  I pulled Tinker’s sweater back on over my head, tiptoed down the hall, and stopped outside his room.

  I listened to the creaking of the house, to the rain on the roof, to the breathing on the other side of the door. Careful not to make a sound, I put a hand on the knob. In sixty seconds it was going to be the midpoint between the beginning and the end of time. And in that moment, there would be a chance to witness, to partake in, to succumb to the now and here.

  In exactly sixty seconds.

  Fifty. Forty. Thirty.

  On your mark

  Get set

  Go

  On Sunday afternoon when Tinker took me to the depot, I didn’t know when I would be seeing him again. Over breakfast he said he was going to spend a little more time at the Wolcotts’ to sort things out. He didn’t mention how long that would take and I didn’t ask. I wasn’t a schoolgirl.

  I boarded the train, walked a few cars ahead, and sat on the wooded side of the tracks so that we wouldn’t have to go through the motions of waving. Once the train was under way, I lit a cigarette and dug in my bag for the Agatha Christie. I hadn’t gotten much further than the seventh paragraph of chapter VIII and I was looking forward to pressing on. But as I pulled the book out of my bag, I saw something jutting from between the pages. It was a playing card torn in two—the ace of hearts. On the face of the card was written: Mata—Meet me at the Stork Club on Monday the 26th at 9PM. And come alone.

  After memorizing its contents, I held the message over an ashtray and lit it on fire.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Road to Kent

  On Monday the 26th of September, I phoned in sick.

  The previous week had been unrelenting. On the twentieth, the drafts of four features vying for our first cover were delivered and Mason Tate hated them all. He threw the pages over the bullpen the way the Russians used to shoot the body parts of interlopers out of the Kremlin cannons back in the direction of their homelands. To better express his dissatisfaction, the next three nights he kept the entire staff at the office until after ten. Alley and I put in half the Sabbath to boot.

  So, having dialed in sick, a wise young woman would have climbed right back in bed. But in as much as the skies were sunny, the air was brisk, and this particular September day promised to be a long one, I aimed to squander every last minute of it.

  Showered and dressed, I went to a café in the Village and drank three cups of Italian coffee topped with steamed milk and shaved chocolate. I drew & quartered a pastry and read the paper cover to cover. I completed the crossword square to square.

  What a transcendent diversion the crossword can be. A four-letter word for solo beginning and ending in A. A four-letter word for sword beginning and ending in E. A four-letter word for miscellany beginning and ending in O. ARIA, EPEE, OLIO—no matter how vestigial these words are in the body of common English, watching them fit so neatly into the puzzle’s machinery, one feels as the archaeologist must feel when assembling a skeleton—the end of the thighbone fitting so precisely into the socket of the hip bone that it simply has to confirm the existence of an orderly universe, if not a divine intention.

  The last squares to be filled in the puzzle were ECLAT—a five-letter word for a brilliant success or ostentatious display. Taking this as a favorable omen, I left the café and went around the corner to Isabella’s hair salon.

  —How would you like it? the new girl Luella asked.

  —Like a movie star.

  —Turner or Garbo?

  —Anyone you like. As long as she’s a redhead.

  Historically, once in the hands of a hairdresser, I had done whatever necessary to stymie conversation: grimacing; sleeping; staring blankly into the mirror; once I even feigned ignorance of English. I just wasn’t much of a small-talker. But today, when Luella started rattling on about Hollywood romances inaccurately, I found myself setting her straight. Carole Lombard wasn’t back with William Powell; she was still with Clark Gable. And Marlene Dietrich didn’t call Gloria Swanson a has-been; it was the other way around. I was surprising the both of us with the extent of my knowledge. It must have seemed like I had followed the celebrity papers for years. But they were just tidbits I had unintentionally absorbed during the workday. When proofreading, these nuts and bolts of the Hollywood conveyor belt didn’t seem so titillating. But they were titillating to Luella. At one point she even called over two of the other girls so I could tell them about Katharine Hepburn and Howard Hughes—since they’d never believe it if they didn’t hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. It was the first time in my life I’d been called the horse’s mouth and it didn’t seem so bad. I began to think that maybe I was a small-talker after all. A hiker and a talker! It was a season of personal discovery.

  Once I was under the dryer, I pulled Agatha Christie out of my bag and proceeded unhurriedly toward the dénouement.

  Poirot had risen unusually early. He had gone to the third floor of the manor and entered the old nursery. Having run his gloved fingertip along the sills, he opened the westernmost window, took a brass paperweight from his jacket (which he had pocketed in the library in chapter fourteen), and shot it laterally across the slate roof up over the adjoining dormer. Like the ball in a Chinese lottery, the paperweight caromed off the far side of the dormer and rattled down a story until it hit the dormer of the master bedroom, where it then angled off over the living room, spilled onto the eaves of the conservatory, and disappeared into the garden.

  Why Poirot would pursue such an experiment one could only imagine.

  Unless . . .

  Unless he suspected that someone, having shot the heiress’s fiancé, had run up the stairs to the nursery and propelled the gun from the window over the adjacent dormer so that it would careen across the west wing and into the garden, prompting everyone to think that the gunmen had dropped it there during his escape. This would allow the killer to come down the stairs from the opposite end of the house asking demurely what all the commotion was about.

  But to accomplish this, one would probably have had to experiment with the angles of the roof—as a child would with a ball. And the only one who had come down the stairs after the shooting was . . . our heroine the heiress?

  Uh, oh.

  —Let’s take a gander, said Luella.

  Coming out of Isabella’s, I remembered Bitsy’s promise to be fast friends and decided to give her a buzz.

  —Can you meet for lunch?

  —Where are you calling from? she whispered instinctively.

  —A phone booth in the Village.

  —Are you playing hooky?

  —More or less.

  —Then of course I can.

  Getting right into the spirit of things, she suggested we meet in Chinatown at Chinoiserie.

  —I can be there in twenty minutes, she promised gamely from the Upper East Side.

  I figured it would take her thirty and me ten. So to give her a sporting chance, I stepped into a used bookshop a few doors from the salon.

  The shop was aptly named Calypso’s. It was a little sunlit storefront with narrow aisles and crooked shelves and a shuffling proprietor who looked like he’d been marooned on MacDougal Street for fifty years. He returned my greeting reluctantly and gestured at the books with an annoyed wave as if to say: Peruse, if you must.

  I picked an aisle at random and walked far enough into it that I would be out of his line of sight. The shelves held highfalutin books with broken spines and ragged covers—the usual secondhand, bohemian fare. In this aisle there were biographies, letters, and other works of historical nonfiction. At first it seemed as if they had been stuffed on the shelves willy-nilly, since neither the authors nor the subjects appeared to be in alphabetical order, until I realized that they had been shelved chronologically. (Of course they had.) To my left were Roman senators and early saints. To my right the Civil War generals and latter-day Napoleons. Looking straight ahead, I found myself smack dab in the middle of the Enlightenment. Voltai
re, Rousseau, Locke, Hume. I tilted my head to read their rational spines. A Treatise on this. A Discourse on that. Enquiries and Inquiries.

  Do you believe in fate? I never have. God knows that Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, and Hume didn’t. But there at eye level on the very next shelf, as the mid-eighteenth century gave way to the late, was a small volume in red leather with a gold star embossed on the spine. I pulled it out thinking maybe it was my pole star—and lo and behold, it turned out to be Assorted Writings by the Father of Our Republic. Turning past the title page, right after the Contents came his adolescent maxims, all 110 of them. I bought it from the old proprietor for fifteen cents, and he looked as pained to part with it as I was pleased to acquire it.

  Chinoiserie was a restaurant in Chinatown which had recently come into vogue. The interior was a fantasy of soon-to-be-clichéd Oriental fixtures: large porcelain urns, brass Buddhas, red lanterns, and the stiff-postured silent deference of an Oriental waitstaff (the last servile ethnicity of America’s nineteenth-century immigrant classes). At the back of the dining room two wide zinc doors swung to and fro, giving the clientele a direct view into the kitchen. It was so hectic it looked more like a village market than a commissary—complete with burlap sacks of rice piled on the floor and cleaver-wielding cooks holding live chickens by the throat. The well-to-do of New York were in love with the place.

  The front of the restaurant was partly offset from the dining room by a large crimson screen swirling with dragons. In front of me a broad-shouldered man with the twang of an oil-producing state was trying to communicate with the maitre d’, an impeccably groomed Chinaman in a tuxedo. Though both men could travel the normal distance from their accents to the neutral ear of the educated New Yorker, they were finding the distance between their respective homelands difficult to traverse.

  The maitre d’ was explaining politely that without a reservation he would not be able to seat the gentleman’s party. The Texan was trying to explain that whatever table he had would do just fine. The maitre d’ suggested that perhaps a table later in the week would suffice. The Texan replied that no table was too close to the kitchen. The Chinaman stared at the Texan for a characteristically inscrutable moment. So the Texan stepped forward and characteristically put a ten-dollar bill into the maitre d’s palm.

  —Confusion say, the Texan observed, you scratchee my back, I scratchee yours.

  The maitre d’, who seemed to get the gist of the remark, would have raised an eyebrow had he had one. Instead, with a sort of grim we-invented-paper-a-thousand-years-ago resignation, he gestured stiffly toward the dining room and led the Texans in.

  As I waited for the maitre d’ to return, there was Bitsy handing her jacket to the coat-check girl. To have gotten here this fast, she must have walked. We greeted each other and turned toward the dining room.

  That was when I saw Anne Grandyn. She was sitting alone in a booth with empty dishes scattered around the tabletop. She looked typically at ease. Her hair was short, her outfit sharp. On her earlobes she wore her emeralds. She didn’t notice me because she had her eyes trained toward the hallway that led to the washrooms, from which Tinker then appeared.

  He looked beautiful. He was back in one of his tailored suits—a tan affair with narrow lapels. He wore a crisp white shirt and a cornflower tie, having (thankfully) put his open-collar days behind him. He had shaved off his beard and gotten a trim, reassuming the elegant and understated appearance of the Manhattan success story.

  I stepped back behind the screen.

  My assignation with Tinker wasn’t until 9:00 at the Stork Club. My plan was to arrive at 8:30 and hide behind a pair of tinted glasses and my new red hair. I didn’t want to spoil the fun. Bitsy was still standing in front of the dining room. If Tinker saw her, my cover might be blown.

  —Psst, I said.

  —What? she whispered.

  I pointed toward the booth.

  —Tinker’s here with his godmother. I don’t want them to see me.

  Bitsy looked perplexed. So I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her behind the screen.

  —Are you talking about Anne Grandyn? she asked.

  —Yes!

  —Isn’t he her banker?

  I looked at Bitsy for a moment. Then I pushed her farther behind the screen and leaned around it. A waiter was just pulling back the table so that Tinker could take his seat. Tinker eased into the booth beside Anne. And in the moment before the waiter tucked the table back, I could see Anne sliding her hand discreetly along Tinker’s thigh.

  Tinker nodded to the maitre d’, who was standing nearby, signaling that they were ready for the check. But when the maitre d’ put the small red-lacquered tray on the table, it was Anne who raised her hand to retrieve it. And Tinker didn’t flinch.

  Anne glanced over the check as Tinker drank every last drop of his drink. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out a money clip with a familiar fold of freshly minted bills. The clip was sterling silver and in the shape of a high-heel shoe—smithed, no doubt, by a maker of whimsical martini shakers, cigarette caddies, and other fine accessories. Like the Texan said: You scratchee my back, I scratchee yours.

  Once she had paid in full, Anne looked up and saw me standing at the front of the restaurant. Ever plucky, she waved. She wasn’t hiding behind an Oriental screen or a potted palm.

  Tinker followed Anne’s gaze to the front of the restaurant. When he saw me, his charms collapsed from the inside out. His face grew gray. His muscles sagged. Nature’s way of letting you see someone a little more clearly for what they are.

  The only consolation in being humiliated is having the presence of mind to leave immediately. Without saying a word to Bitsy, I went through the lobby and out the crimson doors into the autumn air. Across the street, a single cloud was anchored like a zeppelin to the top of a savings & loan. Before it had the chance to cast off, Tinker was at my side.

  —Katey . . .

  —You freak.

  He reached for my elbow. I yanked it away and my purse fell to the ground, spilling its contents. He said my name again. I knelt to sweep up the mess. He got down and tried to help.

  —Stop!

  We both stood up.

  —Katey . . .

  —This is what I’ve been waiting for? I said.

  Or maybe shouted.

  Something fell from my jawbone to the back of my hand. It was a teardrop of all things. So I slapped him.

  That helped. It restored my composure. And unsettled his.

  —Katey, he pleaded one more time without showing much imagination.

  —Off with your head, I said.

  I was halfway up the block when Bitsy caught me. She was uncharacteristically breathless.

  —What was that all about?

  —I’m sorry, I said. I was feeling a little light-headed.

  —Tinker’s the one feeling light-headed.

  —Oh. Did you see that?

  —No. But I saw a handprint on his face and it looked about your size. What’s afoot?

  —It’s stupid. It was nothing. It was just a misunderstanding.

  —The Civil War was a misunderstanding. That was a lovers’ quarrel. Bitsy’s dress was sleeveless and goose bumps were visible on her arms.

  —Where’s your coat? I asked.

  —You ran off so fast that I had to leave it in the restaurant.

  —We can go back.

  —No way.

  —We should get it.

  —Quit worrying about the coat. It’ll find me. That’s why I leave my wallet in the pocket in the first place. Now what’s the fuss?

  —It’s a long story.

  —Leviticus long? Or Deuteronomy long?

  —Old Testament long.

  —Don’t say another word.

  She turned to the street and raised a hand. A cab materialized instantaneously, as if she had powers over their domain.

  —Driver, she commanded, find Madison Avenue and start driving up it.

  Bitsy s
at back and was silent. I could tell that I was supposed to do the same. It was sort of like when Dr. Watson kept quiet so that Sherlock Holmes could deduct. At Fifty-second Street she told the driver to pull over.

  —Don’t move a muscle, she told me.

  She jumped out and ran into the Chase Manhattan Bank. When she came out ten minutes later she had a sweater over her shoulders and an envelope in her hands. The envelope was filled with cash.

  —Where’d you get the sweater?

  —They’ll do anything for me at Chase.

  She leaned forward.

  —Driver, take us to the Ritz.

  Nearly empty, the dining room of the Ritz looked like a half-witted room at Versailles. So we went back across the lobby to the bar. It was darker, smaller, less Louis Quatorze. Bitsy nodded.

  —That’s more like it.

  Bitsy sequestered us in a booth at the back, ordered hamburgers, French fries, and bourbons. Then she looked at me expectantly.

  —I probably shouldn’t tell you this, I said.

  —Kay-Kay, those are my six favorite words in the English language.

  So I told her.

  I told her how Evey and I had met Tinker at The Hotspot on New Year’s Eve and how the three of us had bandied about—to the Capitol Theatre and Chernoff’s. I told her about Anne Grandyn and how she’d introduced herself at the 21 Club as Tinker’s godmother. I told her about the car crash and Eve’s recovery and the night with the closed-kitchen eggs and the star-crossed kiss at the elevator door. I told her about the steamer to Europe and the letter from Brixham. I told her how I’d talked my way into a new job and insinuated myself into the glamorous lives of Dicky Vanderwhile and Wallace Wolcott and Bitsy Houghton née Van Heuys.